


String Theory

by neverfaraway



Series: String Theory [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Coming Out, Eddie Kaspbrak Loves Richie Tozier, Emotionally Repressed, Everybody Lives, Except Stan, Fix-It, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Pining, Richie Tozier Deserved Better, Sorry Stan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-01 14:33:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 16,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20816735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neverfaraway/pseuds/neverfaraway
Summary: Richie Tozier finally gets the chance to spill his guts. Just don't expect him to be happy about it.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This has been _years_ in the writing. Chapter Two came out and what can I tell you? I haven't slept between then and now and suddenly this story is finished. I love and respect that hot mess Richie Tozier and I always will.
> 
> Find the playlist for this story here: [Shake the Disease – a Reddie playlist](https://play.spotify.com/user/neverfaraway/playlist/3Nkhaya9IGo2VE5NAWRvRC)

Now you’re telling me  
You’re not nostalgic,  
Then give me another word for it,  
You who are so good with words  
And at keeping things vague.  
\- _Diamonds and Rust_, Joan Baez

“We shouldn’t have driven,” Eddie is saying. “You sank twice as much as the rest of us, there's no fucking way you should be driving.”

Richie’s three paces behind him, taking the front steps of the Town House two at a time. He has a fervent desire to watch Derry recede in his rear-view mirror. He replies to Eddie without meaning to, words falling out of his mouth the way they have been all evening, with an ease that unnerves him. “Us grown-ups have learned not to yak after three PBRs and a wine cooler.”

“Fuck you, dude, that was my antihistamines -" 

"Well, feel free to stay long enough to sober up; I’m getting the fuck out of Dodge.”

“I’m not staying a second longer than I have to,” Eddie snaps as he grabs their room keys from the pigeonholes behind the service desk. He tosses one in Richie’s direction. “I just thought someone should point out that it probably isn’t safe for you to get behind the wheel of that vehicular representation of a mid-life crisis -"

“You mean your dick didn’t shrink in proportion to that tank you’re driving?”

“Oh, fuck you. See if I care when you get cleared up on the way to the airport.”

On the first floor landing there’s a sad, faded painting of a young woman holding a dog. It occupies the expanse of wall between Eddie and Richie’s rooms, failing to hide the fact that there’s a stain on the peeling wallpaper, behind which a pipe has, at some point, burst. 

“This is complete fucking bullshit,” Richie says, as he attempts to open his door. The key clicks uselessly until he jams it in at a different angle.

“Yeah, we covered that; it’s why we’re fucking leaving.”

“No, I mean - that night with the beer - we were fourteen? No, fifteen - I literally remembered it just now, right this second.”

“Place is a headfuck,” Eddie agrees, pausing in the doorway of his own room. “Makes you wonder what else we forgot.”

“I’ll tell you what I never forgot,” Richie begins, and Eddie lights up with the kind of rage that sets Richie’s brain on fire.

“I swear to fucking God, Richie, if the next thing out of your mouth is a reference to my mother -" His face carries expressions even better than it used to, the lines around his eyes exaggerating his outrage. 

“I sure gave her something to remember."

"Shut up, Trashmouth." 

"No one apart from my publicist really calls me that anymore, Eds," Richie says sadly, his mouth twisting with the urge not to smile.

Eddie’s scowl is extravagant and hilarious. "No one calls me Eds, asswipe."

Richie laughs, then, because the weight on his shoulders has slipped a little and finally let him breathe. "I hate being back in this fucking town," he says, "but it's good to see you."

Eddie shifts from foot to foot, glancing up at him like he’s running a translation and keeps coming up short of anything he can understand. "Likewise, Richie,” he says, in the end. “Now can we get the fuck out of here?"

-

This new, polished, grown-up Eddie makes Richie's mouth run dry. He’s a sharp, brittle version of a memory worn soft with the distance of twenty-five years of forgetting. On first sight he does all kinds of unhelpful, confusing things to Richie's head. Richie's anxious and jittery, unmoored and bumping into people he’s only just remembered, letting Bev fill his glass again and again until he's too drunk to notice the way they all keep ricocheting off each others’ sharp corners.

At the Jade of the Orient, Eddie had unfolded his legs in their expensive slacks and dangled a glass from the fingers of one hand, mouth down-turned and eyes flashing angrily, and Richie had had to swallow and look away. He kept torturing himself and he didn't know why. It was never like this when they were kids; he remembered enough, by then, to know that he’d mostly had the good sense to keep his eyes to himself. Eddie was drunk and he was drunker and they were in each other’s faces and Richie wondered how he'd ever survived this, back then.

When Bev confesses what she saw in the Deadlights, Richie’s almost relieved; the cold nausea of picturing his own death, knowing it’s been foretold, provides a welcome distraction from the constant, static feedback of having Eddie nearby.

There’s whisky in Bev’s glass and she’s taking gulps of it, tears running silently down her cheeks, even though it’s been half an hour since she told them. It’s like someone turned on a faucet and nobody can remember how to turn it off. Ben’s hovering behind her, hands clenching in the moth-eaten upholstery, his handsome face agonised and helpless.

"We're insane," mutters Eddie. He’s in an overstuffed armchair with his elbows resting on his knees, head bowed between them like he’s been told to take deep breaths and count to ten.

Richie laughs. "We're not insane, we’re stupid. You get out of Derry in one piece and you come right on back, voluntarily? That's the definition of stupidity. We're all shit for brains, Eds, that's what you gotta resign yourself to."

Eddie’s head snaps up and he glares at him. "Gee, thanks, Richie, suddenly I feel a whole lot better."

"Look on the bright side," Richie continues, with a shrug, “we'll all be dead shit-for-brains soon, and then we won't care."

He levers himself off the wall and stalks away in the direction of the entrance hall, leaving Eddie in his wake, spluttering and furious. He’s fumbling for the fucking aspirator again, and Richie has had _enough_ of these people he barely remembers and spent twenty five years yearning after like phantom missing limbs. He’s used to spending whole days, occasionally a full week, between shows and projects, in the sanctuary of his own apartment, ignoring calls, his only human interaction being mumbled thanks to a succession of Uber Eats drivers. The closeness he feels to this collection of fuck-ups is setting off fireworks in his chest and he feels stifled by it, in need of respite. 

"Not cool, man,” Mike says as he passes.

"Don't take this the wrong way, Mike," Richie replies, "but get off my fucking ass.”

He spends ten minutes smoking on the front steps, shoulders hunched, kicking the base of one of the ugly balustrades until bits of mortar are tumbling onto the pavement and the toes of his Chucks are scuffed and dirty. It’s years since he’s had a cigarette between his fingers, since the sound of his own cough first thing in the morning disgusted him so much he decided he had to stop. On his way through the arrivals lounge he’d felt nerves fluttering, his chest getting tighter, and he’d found himself buying a pack of Lucky Strikes and a lighter. He smokes the first one down to the filter, coughing like a teenager, and then gets halfway through another before his head’s swimming and he’s got that sick, heavy feeling on the back of his tongue.

When he steps back inside, Mike and Bill are engaged in a somber, earnest conversation, Ben and Bev are murmuring to one another over more whisky, and Richie just wants to go to bed and go back to forgetting all of them exist. Eddie is frowning at him from the armchair, looking like an argument is building on the tip of his tongue, but Richie know he's far, far too tired to deal with the impending tirade.

“I’m turning in,” he says, to no one in particular. “Gotta be at my best when we meet this fucking clown. Sorry, Mikey,” he adds, because sometimes he’s capable of owning his assholery.

Mike smiles in that patient, forgiving way of his and Richie feels even more of a shitheel. He escapes up the stairs before anyone can come up with a reason to stop him.

He’s scrabbling with his key, trying to get inside his room, where he can shut the door on the whole ridiculous, terrifying day, when Eddie says, behind him, in a tone of utter disgust: "Have you been smoking? Your mouth must taste like an ashtray."

“All the better to kiss your mother with,” Richie says, tiredly. “See you in the morning, Eds.”

“Don’t call me that,” Eddie says, and Richie can hear him scowling. “I - uh. Didn’t think we were done catching up, at the restaurant.”

“Aw, Eddie-baby, want to stay up late, braid each other’s hair and talk about boys?”

Eddie face undergoes a fascinating transition. It’s like his whole being contracts with indignation every time Richie opens his mouth. “Fuck you, dude. I just thought it might be nice to get to know the best friend I only just remembered I had, but you know what, I guess I’m good.”

“Eddie. Eds! C’mon, man, I’m fucking with you. You wanna come in?” Richie gestures to his room, as though he’s showing off his condo in the Hills. “No minibar, no TV, not even a fucking view.”

Richie opens the door and lets Eddie inside. Eddie whistles under his breath. “Twin, huh? I got one tiny bed, with a mattress made of asphalt.”

He perches on the edge of the bed Richie slung his overnight bag onto earlier that afternoon. It leaves Richie at sea in the center of the room, so he pushes the door closed and folds himself onto the other bed, wishing he’d been quicker making his escape up the stairs. Somehow he’s still glad Eddie’s here, despite himself.

“You wanna drink?” he asks, desperately. “I can go back down, fetch us a bottle -"

Eddie shakes his head, eyeing Richie with a sustained, considering level of attention that makes Richie feel like his skin’s three sizes too small for his bones. “What?” He demands. “Something wrong with my face?”

It isn’t up there with his greatest lines, but Eddie’s somber expression breaks into a grin all the same.

“Just your face,” Eddie says. “Your face is enough of a problem.”

“You mom would beg to differ,” Richie says, and suddenly it’s easier, because he remembers this. This easy back-and-forth, and the way it made him feel like he was on fire, like he had blood made of pure electricity. 

“Dude, my mom’s dead, show some respect.”

Richie tucks his grin inside an expression of excessive sympathy. “Sorry, man. When?”

“Ten years ago. Cancer.” Eddie shrugs. “I hadn’t spoken to her in a while.”

“RIP, Mrs K., light of my life, fire of my loins,” Richie says, crossing himself. “How come?”

Eddie shrugs again. He picks briefly at the blanket he’s sitting on. There’s such an uncharacteristic stillness about him, it makes Richie’s palms itch. “She, uh. Didn’t get on too well with Myra. My wife,” he adds, quickly. 

There are a thousand things Richie knows he should say, enquiries he could make into Eddie’s life. He knows it would be polite. Instead, he says the only thing that’s been swimming round in his head since Eddie told him to fuck himself that first time in the Chinese restaurant. “I can’t believe you got married, man.”

“What, ’to a woman’?” Eddie snaps, eyes narrowing. “What about you, you really never - ?”

Richie grins. “My dick belongs to the late Mrs K.”

Eddie punches him in the knee. “Shut up about my mom, you asshole. Sitting there in the Chinese place, I wondered to myself if you could possibly have been this much of a dick back then, but now I remember. You were _the_ fucking dick.”

Richie laughs, because yeah, that just about covers it. Their knees are almost touching as they lean towards one another across the gap between the beds. He remembers, with shocking clarity, the pain of this; of having Eddie so close, constantly, and being burned by the proximity, but never being able to push himself away. 

He swings his legs up onto the bed, leaning back against the pillows, an excuse to stop looking at Eddie directly. He remembers this feeling too; it’s answering questions that he realises he’s spent his whole adulthood asking.

“Who’s the lightweight now?” Eddie snipes, and Richie flips him the bird. He covers his eyes with his other hand under the pretence of shielding them from the dim, yellow lightbulb in its inadequate, threadbare shade.

“Give me a break, man. I was in the middle of the tour when Ben called. I’ve been sleeping in airport lounges for weeks.”

“You’re a pretty big deal, huh?” Eddie says, apparently in earnest. “I, uh - looked you guys up, when Mike called. I started remembering names, thought I’d better check none of you was, you know, an actual crazy person.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” Richie says, with a tired wave of his hand. Eddie kicks him with the toe of his expensive loafers. “Turned out to be a washed up comedian telling someone else’s jokes - the same jokes every night, I might add - in a series of ever-shittier college towns. Must have been quite the comedown after Big Bill and his bestselling potboilers.”

“Shut up, you’ve been on TV,” Eddie says. “Not that that’s a marker of anything. I guess Netflix had some cash to burn, because I can’t imagine there’s overwhelming demand for a two-hour show by a hobo telling dick jokes.”

“Yowza!” Richie says, drily. “You got off a good one there, Eds."

When he’d been bundled out of the theatre by his manager, when he’d spewed again and babbled some shit about needing a vacation, having to go back to his hometown for a few days, he hadn’t even thought about Eddie. Hadn’t even remembered his name. He hadn't thought of Eddie when the memories had started flooding in, of Big Bill and the Barrens and little Georgie Denbrough lost in a storm. He hadn't thought of Eddie, as though his mind had kept him sealed away, a special surprise for later that day, a real zinger kept in reserve until he’d really let his guard down. He'd jumped in a cab and Pancho Vanilla had thanked and tipped the driver, and then he’d staggered through LAX on autopilot, because his legs hadn't wanted to close the distance between himself and Derry any more than his mind did and he’d had to surrender himself to the mind-numbing, familiar tedium of pretending it was _just another inter-city flight_ to get himself on the goddamn plane.

The flight attendant had offered him a drink and he’d asked for a double vodka, neat. He knocked it back, closed his eyes, leaned his forehead against the seat in front and it was then that he'd remembered Eddie. With his face against the tray table and the clip leaving its imprint on his forehead, he'd heard Eddie's voice in his head warning him about the germs on the spout of the water fountain outside the Public Library. He remembered Eddie swearing at him when he stuck his hand over the jet and directed it straight into Eddie’s unsuspecting face, recalled the furious jumble of Eddie’s words as he called Richie every vicious word they knew. When the flight attendant returned and asked if he needed assistance, he’d wiped his eyes and muttered something about being on his way to a funeral, grateful when she offered insincere condolences and gave him a wide berth for the rest of the flight. 

Richie realises Eddie’s flat on his back on the other bed, his legs at an awkward angle so that his shoes hang off one side, well away from the blankets. He deliberately doesn’t look, doesn’t think his stomach can handle the view, on nothing but Chinese food and hard liquor. Eddie sighs, long and miserable, then sits up far enough to untie and toe off his shoes. He flops back against the pillows and Richie wonders exactly how drunk he is. There’s a sincerity hanging in the air between them that makes him think that upchucking all over himself might be a brilliant idea, if it’d make Eddie scurry back to his own room and leave Richie alone to get some rest.

“What happened to us, Richie?” Eddie says, in a quiet, angry voice. “There’s so many fucking holes in my memory, I can’t even remember the last time I saw you. I guess one of us left Derry first? Was it Bev? I swear I remember waving her off at the bus depot, but I’ve got no fucking clue when it was.”

“Yeah. Bev was first.”

Richie considers hunting through his bag for the baggie and papers he stashed there; he’d had an inkling he might need something stronger than nicotine to settle his nerves, and this conversation is making it imperative. He imagines Eddie’s expression if he rolled a joint and got baked hanging out the open window of this shitty hotel. He stands up, squints past the reflection of the sickly lightbulb at the view of the festival in the memorial park, the Ferris wheel spinning lazily, a giant illuminated eye high above a sea of multicoloured lights.

“D’you think this thing is really going to kill us?” Eddie says, eventually.

“Eds, c’mon. Don’t be fucking stupid; I say a lot of shit, don’t start listening to me now.”

“Well, between your pessimism and Bev’s fucking visions, we’re dead either way, right?”

Richie rests his forehead against the window frame, watching the Ferris wheel spin. “Are you fucking serious? We kicked that fucking thing in the face, last time - remember? You’ve got balls of steel, man. Don’t turn pussy on us now."

“Fuck you,” Eddie says, bristling. “I’m trying to be fucking honest. I’m telling you, I guess sometime in the last 27 year I forgot how to be a fucking hero.” He finishes this pronouncement with a horrible, self-deprecating laugh.

“That’s bullshit, Eds."

Eddie shakes his head. He's staring at the ceiling, his eyes tracking back and forth over the paint peeling off the light fitting. "No, it's really not. I think, after you guys left, I got scared pretty much constantly. It was fucking exhausting."

"Scared of what?" Richie demands. "Your mom?"

Eddie's neck reddens and he starts to scowl. "I had plenty to be scared of, you turd. You try being a fucking teenage outcast in Derry."

Richie shrugs. "Tried it. Some bits proved worthwhile."

Eddie flushes, eyes snapping to glare at him. “Fuck you, jackass. I was on my own for two fucking years after you left. Mom only moved us to Portland after graduation."

Richie hesitates for a moment, fingers digging into the windowsill. He wants to deny whatever accusation Eddie’s making, to say, ‘well, you had Stan and Bill and Mike, and what did I have? A bunch of kids in a new school who hated me on sight’. It’s making him dizzy trying to reconcile the jigsaw pieces of things he’s always known about himself - the way he tied himself in knots at that high school in Vermont, trying to make out like he wasn’t a complete fucking freak, despite the Voices and the dick jokes and the way he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. The way he’d had to hide even more of himself beneath a facade of normalcy, until he woke up one morning and couldn’t even remember the name of the place he’d used to live. He’d got used to telling the kids that asked that he’d been transferred from the Maine Correctional Institute for Sexual Delinquents, which made them laugh, which was better than making them want to kick his face into the dirt outside the gym hall. 

Another memory swims into focus. Himself, sitting in the hammock in the Clubhouse, his fingers white on the crumpled pages of the comic book in his hand, while Eddie paced in front of him, hands on his hips clenched into angry fists. Richie’s other hand was jammed beneath his thigh, because he’d snatched it back and now he wanted to hide it, to pretend he didn’t even have a hand, if it would stop Eddie sending these sideways, panicked glances at him, an angry flush high on his cheeks. If only he’d left his hand where it was. If only he’d been content with the fact that Eddie had allowed him to rest his open palm on the warm skin just above Eddie's ankle, while they lay in the hammock on this rare afternoon that just the two of them were down there. If only he hadn’t tried to take more than he’d been granted, this would never have happened.

“I don't want to hold hands with you, Richie,” Eddie said. "That’s not - it's not normal."

"Says who, your mom? Because last night she held more than my hand, so -"

"Beep, beep. I'm being serious. She says - look, we just shouldn’t, ok?"

“Do what?" Richie asked, because he’d had to hear it from Eddie's mouth before he'd believe it - or, not believe it, because it wouldn't surprise him in the least if Eddie'd finally realised that Richie'd been macking on him every day for the past four years, because sometimes he felt like it must have been written in letters fifty feet tall right above his head. He had to hear it from Eddie’s mouth to confirm what he’d already known, what he already anticipated. 

"You know what I mean," Eddie snapped. “We're not like that. People’ll say shit about us, and we could do with not giving Gretta Keene any more ammunition, because our lives are going to be _hell_ next year, in any case, and I have no intention of spending another fucking year of high school with my head down a fucking toilet!"

Richie didn't say anything. He wanted to argue that people would say shit whether Eddie wanted them to or not, whether they were both super careful or whether he lost every tiny piece of his mind and kissed Eddie in the middle of the Homecoming dance. He wanted to shout it in Eddie’s face, but Eddie’s cheeks were red and angry and his eyes were fixed over Richie’s shoulder, as though he couldn’t even bear to look Richie in the face.

"Whatever,” he'd said, with a shrug. He’d tossed the crumpled comic book behind him onto the hammock and jumped to his feet. “Wanna go find the others?”

The urge to vomit again is rising and he has to rest his forehead against the cool glass of the window pane for a second, pressing his knuckles into the windowsill. 

He glances at the bed next to him, expecting Eddie to be staring at him. Instead, Eddie’s asleep, his head tipped back, a frown still folding the skin between his eyebrows into a bow. He’s already started fucking snoring.

Richie climbs into bed wearing all his clothes. When he wakes, it’s to Mike banging on the door and Eddie having gone back to his own room, leaving behind mussed sheets and the smell of his expensive cologne. 

-

When he was a kid, no one ever asked Richie Tozier to keep a secret. Everyone knew better than that.

Well, the joke was on them, because Richie was the custodian of the best kept secret in Derry. He kept it so well he forgot about it himself sometimes, half-fell for his own bullshit about the unparalleled size of his cock and its popularity with the womenfolk of Derry. But then it crept up on him unawares and he found himself, in addition to wanting to hold Eddie Kaspbrak’s hand, having filthy dreams about rubbing off on Patrick Hockstetter in the alley behind the Capitol Theatre. That was the point at which he admitted to himself that it wasn't a specific predilection for one particular male human individual, because he fucking hated Patrick Hockstetter, not even an ounce of him had found that douchebag appealing, ipso facto, it wasn't that he wanted to make out with Patrick Hockstetter, it was just that he got hot for the idea of rubbing one out by grinding himself against another dude's dick. So maybe the joke was on him, after all, because Richie Tozier was 100% grade-A homosexual. Or, like, 95%, because he still reflected with fondness on the times they’d stripped down at the quarry with Bev, and Gretta Keene's heinous personality was almost made up for by the fact that she developed an outstanding rack at some point between seventh and eighth grade. Sometimes Richie lost whole minutes in chemistry class gazing down the front of her shirt when she bent over to take a reading from a conical flask. 

The point was, Richie's sexuality was of no concern to anyone but himself and whichever deity could provide concrete proof of their existence, and he always intended to keep it that way.


	2. Chapter 2

Richie's secret got a lot more complicated and cumbersome right around the time he turned fourteen. After dreaming about Hockstetter and, one super-confusing time, about the thing with the tentacles, he’d been left feeling thoroughly bewildered, unable to piece together the code that might have told him what he was and who he wanted. He was fourteen and pretty much constantly horny, so his nightly imaginings still made for a sordid roll call of friends, enemies and Michael J. Fox. It was just that making out or an imagined hand job or sweaty, aimless writhing wasn’t really what got him going, anymore. 

Instead, it was the floor of that shitty kitchen in that shitty house with Eddie's tear-stained face in his hands. Instead of Ben and Bev, it was Richie's lips on Eddie’s releasing him from the grip of the Deadlights. Sometimes it was a drowsy afternoon on the banks of the Kenduskeag, in amongst the willow trees with Eddie pliant and eager beneath him, his mouth pressed wide against Eddie’s warm, salty skin and Eddie’s ice-cream-sticky hands tangled in his hair. That was the imagined scenario that left his eyes stinging when he woke up. However long he lay there willing himself back to sleep, he could never return to that exact, perfect moment. The memory of Eddie holding onto him so tight he could feel both their heartbeats through his skin was sweet and bitter all at the same time. It was the way being around Eddie made him feel a lot of the time in those days.

Richie was good at keeping secrets, so he kept his thoughts to himself. About Eddie's face in his hands in the house on Neibolt and how he'd wanted to kiss him, to make sure the last thing they’d seen had been each other. If he'd had to die, he’d wanted first to tell Eddie that he wasn't alone, that he wouldn't ever have to be alone, not if he didn't want to be.

Those weren't things you just went around telling people. If you told people things like that they got scared and angry, as though quantifying his affections made Richie repulsive. That summer, lingering too long and asking too desperately for ten more minutes of a good-looking boy’s time had taught him that you didn’t ask for things you couldn’t bear being refused. Besides, it wasn't like it changed anything, Richie being the only one who knew. So he kept his secret, and he was fucking good at it, too.

"What w-would we d-do without you, huh, Trashmouth?” Bill had said, after Richie cracked Bowers in the shoulder with a pebble from the safety of the dam. 

"Don't go changing," Bev had murmured, kissing him on the cheek the day she took off for Portland.

"My fucking hero," Eddie said, rolling his eyes, when Richie climbed through his bedroom window at three in the morning on the anniversary of the day they didn't talk about, just to see if he wasn't sleeping, either. 

-

All this comes back to him in the quiet, gentle hold of the Deadlights. 

It’s peaceful, there. There’s warmth stealing over Richie’s sewer-wet clothes, comfort in the way he’s cocooned in numbing, golden light. Ages spread out before him, aeons accelerating just beyond his grasp, and he knows that if he just reaches out, he can grab something and hold onto it, perhaps to tether himself more securely. He’s floating, until suddenly he isn’t.

He’s standing in a room, observing a scene as though through a grimy looking glass.

"You promised,” Eddie is saying, furious. "You said we wouldn't do this.”

They’re in Richie’s shabby room at the Town House, standing beside the twin bed that has the contents of Richie’s bag strewn all over it, the evening sun casting long shadows over Eddie’s pinched-up, angry face. His hands are fists on Richie’s chest and Richie - the Richie who is watching this honey-lit scene unfold - thinks he would definitely have remembered such a thing, had he ever had Eddie’s fingers twisting and untwisting in the overwashed cotton of his t-shirt.

"Can't help myself when I'm around you, baby,” this ersatz Richie says. He’s always hated hearing himself do the Voices, specifically avoids playing back his own recordings. Watching himself, he winces. Eddie is going to swing for him in a pretty second, and he’ll deserve it.

The thing is, Richie knows this is a version of himself and Eddie that never existed. He can taste the pretence on the tip of his tongue, but the sticky air seems to sharpen and solidify around him. He can’t remember where he was before this moment, watching his fingers alight on the buckle of Eddie’s hundred-dollar belt.

The Voice wavers and Richie comes pouring through the cracks. It's painful to watch the careful way he places his hands on Eddie’s skin. "Fuck, I missed you," he says. "Even when I couldn't remember, I had a hole right through me, straight through the middle. You left a fucking entry and exit wound."

"Damnit, Richie," Eddie mutters, blinking rapidly. "Beep, beep."

Richie smiles, despite himself. He watches them, until they disappear.

The haze is dissipating. He’s on a roof, this time, looking down at his own skinny, pale legs in their too-big utility shorts, as his feet dangle off the edge of a sheet of warm corrugated metal. It’s the falling-down barn at Mike’s farm, the one they’d climbed to sit atop and look at the stars, because Eddie had said there wouldn’t be any stars in the middle of Burlington, and they'd argued about what he meant, about light pollution, and about how far away Burlington even was, anyway, until Eddie had shoved him in the chest and cycled off home on his own.

Richie knows they never lay here like this, gazing quietly up at the stars, careful not to turn their heads and catch each other looking, but he can't concentrate because Eddie’s hand is warm and sweaty in his and Eddie’s bare knee is resting against his on rusting corrugated iron still warm from the sun. 

Richie wants - he wants, he wants, he _wants_ \- to do something, but he doesn't know what. His dick feels like it might explode and his face is on fire and his heart feels like it might be on the verge of something catastrophic, but he doesn't know what to fucking _do_. How can he? Eddie's five foot nothing and never been kissed but he’s here and he’s letting Richie hold his hand for the first time in months, and Richie loves him so fiercely he thinks he might need to be sick. 

"Richie,” Eddie says, voice wavering and reluctant. "We need to go home."

"Can we stay?" Richie replies. Eddie turns his head to peer at him through the gloom, frowning, mouth open with an argument about to fall out of it. "Not all night, just -"

"My mom'll have a seizure if she realises I'm gone. I’ll be locked in the house until I’m at least thirty, and that’ll be on you, dickwad."

“You’ll have nothing to leave the house for, anyway, with me gone,” Richie says. “Your mom’ll have to rub one out in my memory, not that they make a vibrator big enough to leave as a true memento."

“Shut your fucking face, Richie!"

Richie's laughing, and his fingers are tight around Eddie's wrist, and he can’t remember why he thought they’d ended this evening with Eddie stomping his way down the ladder and riding off down the road. He closes his eyes and hopes when he wakes up it’s the next morning and his mom and dad have packed up and gone to Burlington without him.

"Richie!”

He sits bolt upright, except he doesn’t, because it’s the middle of the day and the sun’s scorching the back of his neck. He’s on his bike, one sneaker in the dust, looking over his shoulder at the person who called his name. There’s a diminutive figure in the middle of the Kissing Bridge, panting like they ran all the way there. It’s Eddie, of course it is. Richie isn’t sure why, but for a moment, he didn’t recognise him, silhouetted against the canal’s grey, sullen water. There’s a pocket knife in his hand and he shoves it quickly into the pocket of his shorts, fingers still dirty with the flecks of paint he’s scraped off ageing wood. He’s leaving today. He remembers this moment, riding his bike away from the Kissing Bridge for the last time, but it wasn’t like this. He knows it didn’t happen like this.

He watches Eddie stumble towards him. His stomach's churning in a manner he's previously learned to associate with gastroenteric crisis and he feels sweat prickling sharply at his temples. Eddie’s panting, reaching for him with hot, sweaty hands, pink in the face from running, eyes wide and frightened.

"Eddie! Eddie, come on, man - deep breaths."

"I'm not fucking hyperventilating," Eddie snaps and kisses Richie smack-bang on the mouth.

The thing is, Richie knows none of it really happened, even as he fastens shaking fingers around Eddie’s wrist and pulls him closer. He knows none of these things he’s remembering is real. Doubt has been idling in the back of his mind this whole time, but now that it comes to this moment, he can’t really remember why.

-

He does remember: suddenly, with a jolt. He wakes with Eddie leaning over him, his wide eyes jubilant and terrified. His hands are on Richie’s shoulders, his smile is tentative and shocked. He's saying Richie's name. Richie stares up at him, blindsided by the raw, vivid memory of Eddie’s mouth on his. There’s cold, damp stone beneath his shoulders and Eddie is reaching for him again with warm, dirty hands.

He watches Eddie die in stages. He fumbles with his jacket while Eddie is bleeding out in front of him. He clasps Eddie’s hand and mutters at him, saying nothing of consequence. He turns his back for as long as it takes to kill the thing that caused this. He turns his back long enough.

He knew all along that Eddie never really held his hand on the sun-warmed roof of Mike’s tumble-down barn, or kissed him in broad daylight in the middle of the Kissing Bridge. It doesn’t make it any easier to leave him behind.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for this chapter: implied/referenced suicide.
> 
> -

As they all got ready to leave, Bill had slung his bags in the trunk of Richie’s rental car and said he’d appreciate a ride to the airport.

It was a painfully, transparently ridiculous claim, because his own car had been sitting right there, needing to be returned to the same damn hire company. Richie supposed he, Ben, Bev and Mike must have made some sort of pathetic, silent pact in the aftermath of their return from the sewers. 

While they were both still silent and swollen-eyed, Bev had dragged Richie into the shower in her hotel bathroom and washed his hair for him, their clothes already damp with water from the quarry. Ben had appeared with a fresh set of jeans and a shirt two sizes too broad for him across the shoulders, and then they’d _stayed_, even when Richie had told them, in varying degrees of politeness, to fuck off. They’d stayed, and Bill and Mike had joined them, and they’d sat and drunk and laughed, and Bev and Ben had held Richie safely between them, their arms and legs jumbled under him and over him until he’d had no choice but to fall asleep.

He’d dreamed, of course he had. It had been warm and sunlit and golden and he’d woken abruptly to find Bev stroking his hair. She smiled at him and kissed his cheek and he’d wanted to stay there, in this cocoon, with these friends he’d spent half his lifetime forgetting, who turned out to be the only people he’d ever really, truly loved.

“Sure,” he’d said, when Bill had asked. “Why not. I’ve got something I need to do, first."

By midday, he and Bill are on their way to Portland, the road out of town and the Kissing Bridge diminishing in the distance. Bill had switched on the radio, alighting on a golden oldies station to relieve the silence as they drove down Main Street. Richie was grateful for it, the inane chat from the DJ and the innocuous, inoffensive music that he wouldn’t have chosen to listen to in a thousand other lifetimes. 

They’ve just crossed the Penobscot on Route 2, the river far below them swollen and turbid, when the DJ introduces ‘Wichita Lineman’ with a crack about it being the greatest unfinished song of all time.

“Glen fucking Campbell,” Richie sneers in his Sid and Nancy Voice, unable to understand why his chest is tight and his fingers feel like claws on the steering wheel.

He realises his mistake almost immediately. It’s like that game where you try not to think about laughing at a funeral; you try not to listen to the lyrics of some maudlin, middle-of-the-road country song and suddenly you can’t fucking help it. Glen Campbell’s singing about hearing his lover singing in the telephone wires, and Richie’s thinking about the fact that Eddie’s lying under a hundred feet of rock beneath the old house on Neibolt.

_And I need you more than want you  
And I want you for all ti-_

Richie fumbles for the dial and screeches through static until Christian talk radio fills the car with its unthreatening murmur. 

Bill, beside him in the passenger seat, is staring - Richie can feel his gaze sliding over the fingers clenched white on the steering wheel and the tears in his eyes and he can't look, he can't meet that infinitely compassionate gaze -

"P-pull over, Richie."

One of Bill's hands is on the steering wheel, guiding him over to the verge, where the car lurches to a halt and they sit there in silence for a moment while the engine cools in a series of clicks and the preacher on the radio quotes the Book of Isaiah.

"I fucking hate Glen Campbell," Richie rasps, his fingers clenched, now, in the denim of his jeans. 

At length Bill smiles with the corner of his mouth, his eyes sad. “That’s ok, Richie."

“Fuck off, man - don’t do that - “

“What am I doing?”

“Don’t fucking humor me, _Jesus_. I’m fucking sick of this bullshit!”

“Richie, what bullshit?"

“All this bullshit about me and Eddie,” he says, finally, and he can’t believe it’s taken him so long to get to this. The words feel like they’ve been building in him for hours, bubbling up and threatening to spill out of him, pitch-black and corrosive. “Yeah, I sure loved him, then forgot all about him for 27 years, like... how could I forget him, Bill? How could I forget _him_?”

“Richie." 

“No, seriously, fuck this shit, man. Fuck this shit.”

Richie’s head is in his hands and he wants to tear himself apart, break his skull in two and just rip the memories loose. He wants them bloody and separate from him and gone. At least if he went back to forgetting, he wouldn’t have to live with the knowledge that none of it, no part of this fucked up write-your-own-adventure, has been worth it. Because he’d remembered Eddie only to lose him, and It had known that was the only thing It could have done to him that he wouldn’t be able to bear. That fucked-up, motherfucking - 

“- Richie! R-Richie, stop!”

Bills hands are on his, then Bill’s arms are around his shoulders and Richie grasps at him like he’s drowning. He gasps and sobs and gets boogers on Bill’s shirt, grinds his eyes against Bill’s shoulder until they’re raw and his head feels empty. Emptier. He can feel a migraine coming on. 

“I’m so sorry, Richie,” Bill says, his voice like a wound. He sounds so defeated and Richie hates it almost more than anything else about this shitty day.

“I’m good,” he says. “I’m good. Sorry, Bill. I just-“

“Give me the keys,” Bill says, in the voice that brooks no argument, the one that told them to _swear, swear you’ll come back._ “I’m driving.”

“I don’t need a fuckin’ pity ride,” Richie grumbles, even as he hands over the keys. “Jeez, you have one complete mental breakdown and everyone treats you like you’re an invalid.”

He wipes his face with his sleeve and takes a deep, wet, shuddering breath, somewhat undermining his point. 

“Just swap seats, asshole,” Bill says gently. Richie hates it, _hates it_, and thinks fat, shameful tears might start leaking out of him all over again. “Let me do this.”

So Richie rides to the airport in the passenger seat of his own rented car, resting his forehead against the cool vertical plane of the window. His vision’s blurring, he’s got his glasses clenched in the fist of his right hand, and he just wants Bill to drive and drive and drive until Derry is a place he barely even remembers.

-

When they land in LA, it’s sunny and there’s smog over the city, like always. It feels like coming out of a movie theatre in the middle of the afternoon, bewildered by the light and disoriented by the passage of time. He says goodbye to Bill in the arrivals hall, promises he’ll call, then thumbs through his phone to summon an Uber.

His apartment’s unchanged. It’s identikit LA-minimalist white and, here and there, splotches of colour where Richie’s left his unsophisticated mark. Here, a framed print of the first issue of 'Uncanny X-Men'; there, a dumpy couch he bought at IKEA, cushions warped into the negative shape of Richie’s body by dint of the number of hours he spends there on his worst days, eating chips and staring mindlessly at porn.

Grief comes to him in waves. He drifts through days with nothing touching him, his manager’s concern breaking over him without leaving a mark. The only times it lands are when something catches him off guard and he feels his face twisting into that awful, screwed up, wrung-out shape. Tears come without him meaning them to, visiting him when he catches his own eye in the bathroom mirror, in the middle of the 7-Eleven, in his car at the intersection of Santa Monica and Century Park East while he’s waiting for the signals to change. His manager suggests a therapist, but there is absolutely no way to explain to anyone - anyone but Mike, maybe, and he’s in Florida, Richie hopes, getting some of that sky he’d been jonesing for - that he isn’t just grieving for Eddie, the love of his empty life, but for the kids he and Eddie used to be, for all of them, for the lives they could have lived had they not had the misfortune to have been teenage losers in Derry that summer of 1989. 

“You’re a fucking mess, Richie,” he swears he hears Eddie scoff one early afternoon, shortly after waking up on his couch with a hangover like a thunderstorm. When he opens his eyes, the phone is loose in his grasp and Bev is speaking to him, slowly and kindly, telling him that he ought to come to Boston, that she and Ben would love to see him.

On a Sunday in November he drives all the way out to the coast. There’s a haze on the horizon and the sunlight feels grey and thin. He sits in the dunes at Carpinteria, watches the waves claim and reclaim the sand, and thinks about poor, brave Stanley Uris. He isn’t brave, not like Stan and Eddie were; the sea frightens him, always has. Since leaving Derry for the second time he recognises the shape of the hole inside him. He traces its edges with his fingertips and they come away bloody.

He stops off at the 7-Eleven on the drive back to his apartment and avoids the cashier’s eyes. In the end, it’s like falling asleep, which is great, because he’s very, very fucking tired.

-

“Richie, I did it! I killed It!”

There’s a voice in the distance, shouting things at him that he doesn’t understand. It sounds like Eddie, but not like him, like some half-remembered figment of his imagination.

Richie remembers the peculiar pain of being fifteen-nearly-sixteen with special antipathy, having avoided remembering that summer with such totalitarian efficiency for the past 24 years. 

The summer of 1992 was a hot one - a dry, dusty drag of weeks and months that had the Kenduskeag crawling low and turbid along cracked and hard-baked banks. The Losers Club - what remained of it, now that Bev was eighteen months gone and Richie had a job at the Capitol - had spent most of their days hunkered down in the shade of the old willows by the curve of the shallowest part of the river, or sprawled on the cliffs by the quarry under the glare of a baleful August sun. 

Richie recalls that summer with sick, heavy resentment, remembering how it had been pregnant with the imminence of his departure. He'd told them in June that the Toziers were leaving Derry in September, and by the time late August rolled around the air in the Clubhouse had been heavy with the knowledge that the end of the month brought with it not just a return to school. It had made the Losers listless and glum. It was making Richie crazy, the way they all lay around in the dust when they ought to have been making the most of having Richie there with them still, their number still almost a full complement, but he couldn't think of anything to do either, and so they lay there, reading comic books and talking shit, until the final day when Richie had appeared after work, loping towards them over the Barrens, and announced, while throwing himself to the ground at Eddie's side, "The End Is Nigh! Brother Richard Tozier is Not Much Longer for This World!"

He’d gone down to the Kissing Bridge to carve his and Eddie’s initials there that evening in a single, symbolic act of sentimentality. He’d cycled all the way home feeling brave and proud, like he’d proved something to the world, even if there hadn’t been anyone there to witness it. When he’d freewheeled down the hill and turned into his street, he’d spotted Eddie, hunched and miserable on his bike, lurking near the streetlamp at the end of the Tozier’s front yard.

“You’d better fucking write,” Eddie had said, glaring at him. “And I don’t mean some shitty postcard with a dirty picture and a line about my mom. I want letters, asshole, and phone calls."

“I love you, too, Eddie Spaghetti," Richie had replied, watching Eddie's face, watching the way he sort of raised his hand and then didn't. It looked like he’d wanted to reach out and touch. They didn't do that, though, not since Eddie’s freak-out in the Clubhouse, and Richie felt his heart racing at the thought of Eddie's hands on him for a reason other than roughhousing or a punch on the arm. 

"Don't call me that,” Eddie had said, and Richie's face had fallen, his eyes sliding away to rest on the concrete by their feet. 

"Sure thing, partner," he'd said, Lone Ranger Voice falling damnably short of convincing. "See you around, I guess."

He’d watched Eddie cycle away, his shadow growing longer under the streetlights, like a cartoon Eddie made out of taffy, being pulled this way and that, until Eddie had turned the corner and disappeared from view. He'd trudged his way up the driveway and gone up to his room to finish packing, an ache right in the center of his chest that wouldn’t go away.


	4. Chapter 4

He slips from the grasp of the Deadlights and drops like a stone to the floor of the cave. The base of his spine aches, his elbows are bleeding, and his head is ringing with a sound like a far-away siren. He blinks up at the distant, gaping roof, unable to piece together cause and consequence. There’s a frantic voice just outside his ability to grasp its meaning - “I did it! I think I killed It, Richie!” - and he honestly can’t remember where he is or why. The last thing he remembers is the sound of the sea off the beach at Carpinteria and the long journey back to his apartment. 

A hand tugs at his and an elated, grimy face appears above him. “I did it, Rich. I killed It." 

Fuck. “Eddie,” he says, not even sure he’s making human sounds. His head hurts so fucking bad. He acts without thinking, puts his arms around the figure looming over him and throws himself sideways, hoping whatever he lands on is more forgiving than the rocks he bounced off a moment ago.

“Richie, what the -“

Eddie rolls beneath him and Richie holds on to the sodden red jacket, Eddie’s hands like claws on his shoulders as he squawks, terrified, in Richie’s ear. 

A sound like a whisper splits the air just beside Richie’s face, and small pieces of stone ricochet as a huge talon strikes the floor behind them. 

“We gotta move,” he shouts in Eddie’s face, because his hearing still isn’t quite functioning. He gets a hand under Eddie’s shoulder, heaves him in a direction he can only identify as _away_ from the skittering of claws and the growl falling out of that disgusting, tooth-filled mouth. They fall over one another’s feet. Eddie’s twisting round in Richie’s grasp, shrieking something panic-stricken and foul-mouthed at whatever he sees over Richie’s shoulder. By the time they reach the mouth of the passageway, Richie's trying to keep them upright, but the ground drops away more sharply than he anticipated. They tumble head-over-ass down the rocky slope and come to an abrupt, crunching halt at the bottom, hard-up against the slimy wall of the cave.

For a fleeting moment, Richie’s relieved to be alive, and at a temporary remove from the growling, thrashing monster they’ve left behind them in the upper chamber. Then he realises that Eddie is clutching at his arm and writhing on the floor, moaning like a wild animal caught in a trap. 

“My arm! You broke my fucking arm! Jesus fucking Christ, Richie!”

Richie gapes at him. The last time he saw Eddie, it had been with Eddie’s blood on his hands, as Mike and Bill dragged him away. Eddie’s empty body had been propped against a rock, covered in blood and the filth from the sewer, his head bowed to his chest, as they left him all alone in the dark.

Richie has to get his hands on him, to prove to himself that Eddie’s chest really is heaving with every agonised breath as he clutches at his broken arm. He lurches to his knees and pulls Eddie towards him, tucking him into his chest the way he had that time - that time in the Deadlights. The fucking Deadlights. He gets a hand in Eddie’s hair, shoves his face right into Eddie’s sweaty, filthy, shuddering shoulder. 

“Get the fuck off me!” Eddie sobs, punching Richie in the chest with his uninjured arm. “The same fucking arm! You broke the same fucking arm, you motherfucking asshole!”

Richie can’t let go of him. He doesn’t know how to. Eddie’s swearing at him and punching him again, and Richie can’t let him go.

“Richie, please! Let go of me! My arm really fucking hurts.”

He blindly presses his cheek against the side of Eddie’s face, searching for him uselessly, not even to kiss him, just to press his forehead against Eddie’s nose, his closed eyes, his filthy skin, because it’s warm and vital and he doesn’t want to remember anymore what it was like to hold him knowing he’d somehow missed, and therefore at least partly allowed, the life ebbing out of him.

“Richie,” Eddie says, in a quiet, bewildered voice. “It’s ok, it’s only my arm - C’mon, Rich. It’s ok, you didn’t hurt me.”

“I broke your arm,” he mutters into Eddie’s neck. He curls his arms as far around Eddie as he can get them, holds him so fucking tight.

“Yeah, you fucking did,” Eddie says, sounding like he might cry. “It’s ok, Richie, I promise. We’re ok.”

Richie laughs, because he’s so far from being ok; he hasn’t been remotely ok since he was thirteen years old and he realised he didn’t care if the clown ate him alive, as long as Eddie didn’t have to die afraid. Eddie’s good arm comes up to hug him, tentative like he can’t work out why Richie has fallen apart and doesn’t know how to put him back together. They hold onto each other. Eddie’s forehead rests on Richie’s shoulder and he’s making noises like he always used to when he was pretending not to cry.

“Richie,” he says, in a small voice. “I’m not kidding, my arm fucking hurts. We need to find the others."

Richie draws himself away, every inch like peeling off a band-aid. Eddie looks at him, his face pinched with pain and concern. “You ok, man?”

Richie nods. He takes off his glasses, rubs his thumbs into the corners of his eyes. When he opens them, Eddie is staring at him. There’s something in his expression that’s scared, but not the sort of scared that etches itself all over his face when there’s a psychotic clown bearing down on them intent on ripping them limb from limb. This fear is quiet and sincere, and it makes his eyes dart over Richie’s face like he can’t quite work out what he wants to start yelling about first.

“I’m good,” Richie says, with effort. “Can you walk?”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “It’s my arm, not my leg, dipshit. Just - uh - help me up."

Richie hauls himself to his feet and extends a shaking, sweaty hand, which Eddie grasps, pulling himself up to stand beside him, broken arm hanging limp and obscene at his side. His hand in Richie’s is clammy and damp, but his pulse is strong beneath the fingers Richie lays against his wrist. It's comforting; he lets it drop, before Eddie can look at him again with questions forming behind his thin, downturned mouth.

“Here,” he says, shrugging off his jacket. “Make a sling.”

He ties the arms around Eddie’s neck, makes sure his arm is as straight as can be managed, tucks it into Eddie’s chest. Eddie lets him and barely says a word.

With a clatter of loose rocks, Bill, Bev and Ben scramble into the mouth of the cave and slither down the slope towards them. Behind them they hear the skittering of claws, the roar of that awful voice. 

“Mike!” Bill shouts, looking like he’s about to climb straight back up the slope to look for him. 

Mike’s terrified face appears at the mouth of the cave and he flings himself after them, rolling to a halt at Richie’s feet. The spider roars and thrashes above them, its claws scrabbling and tearing at the rocks.

“Oh my god, Eddie - “ Bev starts towards him, but Eddie wards her off with his left hand.

“This idiot broke it. Again. The same fucking arm. Just don’t fucking hug me.”

“I was saving his life at the time,” Richie points out, his head swimming.

Bill has helped Mike to his feet. Above them, It rears and crashes against the cave’s narrow mouth. “Come out, Losers!” It screeches. "Come out and play!”

“Well, there’s only one way out from here,” Bill says, as Ben investigates a passageway which opens from the cave, its entrance no taller than half Richie’s height. "Can you make it?” He asks, glancing dubiously at Eddie’s injured arm.

“You think I’d rather stay here to be eaten? Are you out of your fucking mind? Richie’ll have to help me - huh, Richie? - his punishment for landing on me.”

Richie flinches, remembering clambering back to the cavern with Eddie already a deadweight in his arms, a bloodied, gasping mess with his hands looped around Richie's neck.

“Good job I already killed that fucking leper,” Eddie grumbles, shuffling closer, slinging his good arm over Richie’s shoulder. “Got both hands round his neck and strangled him. He wasn’t so big, then.”

He says it belligerently, proudly, and Richie’s brain alights on a memory, something he saw in the Deadlights. He can see Mike making the connection, too, lets him say it first: “That’s it, that’s how we kill It.”

They scramble their way through the passageway, Eddie huffing and puffing at Richie’s side, bitching in his ear about his arm and how the doctors had told him last time he’d been one stray shard of bone through his brachial artery away from bleeding out. It occurs to Richie, suddenly, that he doesn’t know the denouement of this story. Eddie’s not clutching Richie’s blood-soaked jacket to his chest in an attempt to keep his insides on the inside, but that doesn’t mean one of them isn’t going to die. 

“Listen,” he says, because he can’t bear the idea of Eddie stuck down here, after all this effort to save him. “If that fucking clown takes me out, if It gets the rest of us, head back into the tunnels, one of them’s gotta lead to the river."

“I am not climbing down any more fucking holes,” Eddie hisses. “Were you even listening to what Bill said? This is the only way out, numbnuts."

“Well, good luck climbing out of that well, without me there to help you.”

“Shut your fucking mouth, Richie,” Eddie snaps, his eyes shining. “And don’t call me that. You know I - “

Richie doesn’t get to find out what, not that he couldn’t guess, because Eddie chooses that moment to launch himself across the space between the boulders, and Richie follows him. There’s a giant demonic spider bearing down on them and they’ve only got one shot at bullying this asshole down to size. 

This time when Richie rips It’s talon from its diminished, writhing body, it’s with Eddie standing pale-faced and filthy at his side. He hopes It knows, as he squeezes the life out of It’s straining, struggling heart, that this time victory actually feels like winning.


	5. Chapter 5

Richie takes his glasses off to clean them; somehow he’s neglected to notice the blood smeared on the cracked lens. He wipes them carefully with the hem of his shirt.

They wheeled Eddie out of surgery two hours ago. He’d needed pins in his arm; one look at the X-ray in the ER had had the doctor placing a call to the surgical ward, and Richie had found himself walking silently beside Eddie through corridor after corridor until they reached a surgical suite. Suddenly a nurse had been asking him politely but firmly to let go of the gurney so it could be wheeled through the double doors and Mr Kaspbrak could be anaesthetised.

“Enjoy the ride, Eds,” he’d said, as Eddie’s terrified face disappeared from view. “See you on the other side."

There’d been someone tugging at his arm, then, and it had taken him a moment to realise that it was Bev. Bev, taking his hand in hers and coaxing him to follow her away from the hospital. He'd hated the tightness in his chest, the way he hated the fact that Eddie was out of his reach, in the hands of the surgical team, a higher power he didn’t know how to fight if he needed to.

“Come on, Richie,” Bev had said gently. “I didn’t want to mention it, but you stink like sewer. Let’s go get a shower.”

“If I’d known all it’d take was another near-death encounter, I’d have found a way to bring that fucking clown back years ago,” he’d mumbled, because he hated the ever-so-careful way she was talking to him.

She just kissed the side of his head, even though his hair was foul with sewer water, and made him get in the car when Bill pulled up next to the kerb. He clambered into the back seat and Bev followed, so he was bracketed between she and Ben again, both of them warm and calm beside him. 

“We should go to the quarry to clean up,” Mike said from the front seat.

“Not without Eddie,” Bill replied, and that seemed to settle that. He turned the car in the direction of Derry; it was a twenty-minute drive each way from Bangor. They could be back by the time Eddie was out of surgery.

Ben hovered while Richie collected a change of clothes from his room, and then they all trailed up the stairs and crowded into Bill’s room, the only one with a walk-in shower. They took it in turns to wash away the filth from the sewers, standing silently under the spray until the last of the grey water swirled away down the drain. There was something familiar about the fact that none of them could bear to be alone. 

Here, now, wearing a clean shirt, with his broken glasses set down in front of him on the blankets of Eddie’s hospital bed, he’s trying hard not to completely lose his mind.

Bev got visions of their future deaths, and he got - what? A rolodex of memories he'd never even experienced, just to drive home the fact that he was still as much of a pussy as he always had been. Just to make him live with the memory of Eddie’s lifeless body lolling against him like a bloody, stringless marionette. He pushes his thumbs into the corners of his eyes.

“Hey,” Eddie says, sounding like he’s been smoking fifty a day, his voice a rasping, creaking groan. He’s staring in a slightly cross-eyed way at Richie’s broken glasses on the blankets. He smiles like the discovery is miraculous and unexpected. “Richie.”

“We drew straws for who had to sit with you,” Richie says, picking up his glasses. "Guess who fucking lost."

"Every time I’m shitting myself, convinced I’m gonna die, there you are,” Eddie mutters, his eyes sinking closed.

Richie ducks his head, focuses on the feeling of the splintered glass between his fingers. 

When Eddie next wakes up, Richie’s fallen asleep face-first on the edge of the mattress, a damp patch forming under his chin. He scrubs at his face with the back of his hand while Eddie grouses about his contempt for basic hygiene control, how Richie’s had his face planted in what is essentially a plague vector for antibiotic-resistant staph infection, how it won’t be Eddie’s fault when he develops necrotising fasciitis and his face rots off mouth-first.

“Fuck you, sleeping beauty,” Richie says. His left hand’s tangled in the blanket; his fingers are curled around Eddie’s where he avoided the cannula and took hold of the least invasive part of Eddie he could reach. Eddie doesn’t seem to mind, which is startling but perhaps a side-effect of the last of the anaesthetic wearing off. 

“You really freaked me out in the cave, man,” Eddie’s saying. “After It had you in the Deadlights. What the fuck happened?"

Richie flexes his fingers, watches Eddie notice their proximity. He has to look away before he’s forced to watch Eddie shake him loose like a foul, persistent irritant, but Eddie doesn’t do a fucking thing. He holds Richie’s gaze, nudges Richie’s pinkie with his own.

Something borne of Richie’s fatigue tears itself free inside him and he cannot bear to enter into the pretence of hope when he knows full well how it all will end. He reclaims his hand and wipes it self-consciously on the leg of his pants.

"Do you know anything about space and time travel and shit?” he demands.

Eddie stares at him blankly. “Dude, have you been taking my tranqs?"

Richie pushes both hands into his hair. The anxious need in the coil of his guts has started up again, making him wish for a cigarette. “Fuck you, man. There’s this idea, like the theory of relativity - yeah, I read books, asshole - called string theory, and it says that there’s an infinite number of versions of this reality, of us, and I just find it really fucking comforting, because somewhere out there there's a Trashmouth and an Eddie Spaghetti who never saw a fucking clown and never went into those fucking sewers, and that could have been us, man! That could have been us -”

“Hey -” Eddie reaches out to take hold of Richie’s flailing arm.

“No,” Richie says, miserably, "don’t – it makes me fucking furious. That coulda been us, Eddie.”

“Richie -”

“I hope that fucking clown rots in hell - wherever the fuck It ended up. I hope It’s rotting somewhere and It knows It fucking lost. It stole twenty seven fucking years from us. This fucking place stole twenty seven fucking years.”

“Would you calm the fuck down?” Eddie says. “We all lost. We all did.”

“Forgive me a brief interlude of self-pity, Eds, but no. You and Ben and Bill, I’m pretty fucking sure you didn’t."

"What, so it's my fault?” Eddie’s pouting, furious, one arm curled defensively across his chest. It’s the kind of picture that used to make Richie cry _cute, cute, cute!_ and leap about like a madman to try and quiet the turmoil inside him. Now, with the memory of grief weighing him down, it just makes him furious, like he wants to tear something apart with his bare hands. “It’s my fault you’ve had a shitty life?"

Richie laughs. His head is in his hands. His throat is tight, crowded with words he’s spent his whole life never quite being able to spit out. Long, miserable, wastelands of days have been lost sinking further into the couch in his dark apartment, loathing himself, calling himself _coward_ and _pussy_ because there’s something broken within him that stops him telling people this thing that, to anybody else - in LA, in 2016, for fuck’s sake - wouldn’t be a problem. He’s never been able to name the thing that’s been stopping him, but now he can put a name to It, and It’s dead. 

“I’m so fucking tired, man. Turns out forty years is a fucking long time to keep up a lie, even if it’s a really fucking good one.” 

“Richie,” Eddie says, like he's warning Richie away from the edge of the quarry, like the first time they went there, when he fastened the fingers of one hand around Richie’s wrist and promised that if he was going to die, he was taking Richie with him, motherfucker. Richie has no idea what Eddie has to be so scared about, and it makes him even angrier.

“Fuck it. Eddie, I’m gay. I’m _gay_. You’ve no fucking idea how scared I’ve been to say it. Forty fucking years, and I’ve never said it out loud to anyone. You haven’t got a fucking clue - " 

“Who says I don’t?” Eddie spits, and it hangs between them sharp and angry and impossible to take back. 

Richie lifts his head and looks at him. Eddie’s face is ashen, his mouth open, dumbly, like he’s finally, finally run out of words. His good arm is frozen on the bed, hand clenched on the handrail. There’s a pale slice of skin around the base of his third finger, the shadow of the wedding ring that’s sitting in the cabinet to the side of Eddie’s bed amongst his other personal effects. 

Through the open door, the sounds of the hospital are audible but muffled. A distant cacophony of announcements and footsteps on linoleum. Ben’s down the corridor with Bev, both of them loathe to be apart. Richie is so, so godamned tired. He takes off his glasses, runs a hand over his face. He needs a shave, and he could do with a haircut, too, something to make him look less like a hobo who tells dick jokes. 

“Richie,” Eddie says, urgently.

“Beep, beep, Eds."

A nurse in green scrubs appears at the open door and Richie propels himself away from Eddie’s bed with a determination he didn’t know he could possess.

“Sorry to interrupt,” she says, unapologetically. “We got through to your wife, Mr Kaspbrak. Soon as the doc says you’re mobile, you can give her a call.”

Eddie’s eyes flicker nervously in Richie’s direction. “Uh, thanks - of course, as soon as I can.”

Apparently satisfied, the nurse reaches for the chart at the foot of Eddie’s bed and begins an inspection of the IV bag connected to his cannula. Richie is left floating in the center of the room. Eddie shifts, as though he might reach out with his uninjured arm, and Richie knows if Eddie puts a hand on him right now he might implode, down to ashes and cinders and not much else.

“Richie,” Eddie says, miserably. 

He isn’t going to stick around to hear _Richie, I didn’t mean it_, so he flashes the nurse a grimace and says he’ll be getting out of Eddie’s hair. He picks up his hoodie and makes a swift exit to the corridor, where Ben and Bev are waiting and the world is still a place in which nobody has witnessed Richie Tozier failing to keep his secret.

He’s wondered about Myra Kaspbrak from the moment Eddie mentioned her, pictured the woman who had taken the place of good ol’ Mrs K. with no small amount of derision, because who the fuck does that? Who the fuck actually marries their mother? It’s every sad cliche wrapped up in every sad gay joke, and it had been funny because Eddie had been so adamant it wasn’t true. Only now does it occur to him to feel sympathy for Myra Kaspbrak, because God help her, what if she actually loves him?

“Rich, honey?” Bev says. She hands her steaming cup of coffee to Ben and reaches for Richie's arm.

“Who rang his wife?” He says, when what he means is, _I’d forgotten she fucking existed, and I think he had, too._

“The nurses asked, they needed his next of kin -”

It’s the sympathy in her voice that makes it so unbearable. Bev’s always possessed the ability to stare straight into Richie’s soul, and now he wonders whether she’s known all along, despises her for it despite knowing it’s uncharitable and entirely unfair. He shrugs off the hand that’s drawing soothing circles on his back and pushes his glasses up his face so he isn’t looking at her through the shattered part of the lens.

“Bev, it’s fine.”

“Richie, in the Deadlights, did you...?”

He nods, observing the way she’s clutching the shirt she’s wearing - much too big, obviously Ben’s - closer around her, bruises visible under the edges of the rolled up cuffs. “It got Eddie,” he says, tiredly. “And I - it got me, too. It was fucked up.”

“I’m so sorry,” Bev whispers, and they hang onto one another for a moment, the two of them alone in the universe, recipients of a dubious honour.

“Bev, I need some sleep,” he says, eventually. 

“Ok. You want company?”

She offers so easily, and he could just as easily agree, and then she and Ben and Mike and Bill would pile in and huddle around and form a shield between him and reality. He wants it as much as he shies from it, so he gratefully accepts her kiss on his cheek, even as he says, “Take care of yourself, for once,” as gently as he can. 

Ben’s at her elbow and Richie feels guilty for his envy of the ease with which they’ve slid together into this simple tesselation; he can’t imagine them one without the other, now, when before it had seemed so ludicrous, in the face of Ben’s infatuation and Bill casting a shadow no one could ever hope to outgrow.

“You, too, man,” Ben says. “You need a ride?”

“I’ll get a cab. Someone ought to stay with him.”

So he finds himself walking into downtown Bangor, a city he knows he visited, years ago, with his Mom, in search of a suit to wear to Stan’s bar mitzvah. He remembers enough that he hopes it’s changed in the intervening years. He finds a Starbucks, orders an Americano to go, and is waiting at the counter when he hears a nearby voice fail to whisper, “Hey, isn’t that -?”

He holds his breath, but the guy’s friend replies, “From that shitty Netflix thing? Dude, he _died_ onstage last week, pretty sure he’s supposed to be in rehab -”

He hunches his shoulders, wishes his jacket wasn’t on the way to the hospital incinerator so that he could hide behind its collar. By the time they got Eddie to the hospital, everything they wore had been sodden. The stench of the sewers had hung over them, and Eddie had made a pinched, agonised face as the nurse had lifted his arm out of its filthy makeshift sling. Richie makes for the door, his stomach churning.

A couple of blocks away, he calls an Uber, then waits for it in the window of a bookshop, lurking near the crime fiction until it pulls up outside.

The Town House is silent, the street empty, when he’s deposited on the kerb outside. Bill’s over at Mike’s depressing attic in the Library helping him box up the remains of his research, so with Bev and Ben keeping vigil at the hospital, Richie finds himself alone for the first time in nearly 96 hours. Eddie’s blood has been cleaned off the floor of the second floor landing and there’s no trace of the doomed kid’s fucked-up skateboard. The painting of the woman with the dog is still extremely fucking creepy, the wallpaper still looks like it’s the only thing holding up the damp wall. He’s so fucking tired and he just wants to go home, wherever the fuck that is. More than anything else, he needs to sleep.

He takes another shower. He watches clear water circle the drain, scrubs his skin til it’s red and stinging. By the time he emerges, the sun’s low in the sky over the Ferris wheel. He gathers up the detritus he’s scattered round this shitty room over the course of his stay, throws it back in the overnight bag, and falls into bed wearing his shorts and the only clean t-shirt he has left. It's a threadbare Pearl Jam tour shirt that he’s washed so many times it only bears the ghost of the No Code logo. Its smell, like ozone and pot, reminds him of LA.


	6. Chapter 6

Richie wakes to the sound of someone hammering on the door. He fumbles for his phone on the nightstand and squints at it. 10AM. He’s slept nearly thirteen hours.

He stumbles across the room, wondering what could possibly be so urgent, trying to ignore the thundering of his heart against his ribs. The clown’s fucking dead, there’s no reason for anyone to be trying to break down his door at this time in the morning.

He opens it cautiously to find Eddie standing right in the center of the doorway, dressed in jeans and a dark t-shirt. It looks incongruous; the whole time they’ve been in Derry, Richie’s only seen him in his pastel and burgundy style pig get-up, but he supposes that outfit’s gone the way of the incinerator, too. 

“What the fuck are you doing here?"

“You’re leaving,” Eddie says, like he’s accusing Richie of something unthinkable. He’s peering over Richie’s outstretched arm at the packed bag on the spare bed. His arm’s in a cast, his fingers just poking out from the end, and for a second Richie could almost believe it’s 1989 and they’re arguing over who gets first read of the latest issue of X-Men. He laughs.

“Of course I’m fucking leaving. You think I’m going to stay in this shitty town any longer than I have to?”

Eddie barges past him, cast held against his chest like a shield. “What happened to ’see you on the other side’, motherfucker?”

“Do come in,” Richie says in the Toodles the Butler Voice, because Eddie’s in his room again, and he hadn’t thought he’d have to deal with this situation so many times in so few days. “Make yourself at fucking home. Who the fuck let you out of the hospital?”

“I discharged myself, because you dropped your fucking bombshell and walked out, some fucking mic drop by the way, and I knew, I fucking knew you’d be pulling this kind of shit - “

“Yeah, I’m the one pulling shit. You’re twenty-four hours out of surgery! How the fuck did you even get here?”

“It’s been thirty-nine hours, and don’t fucking deflect, asshole. Ben drove me, I made him, so don’t go fucking blaming him when I collapse and die on the floor of this shitty hotel room, because this is all on you.” Eddie jabs him in the chest with the fingers of the hand not encased in plaster.

“How’s your wife?” Richie asks, hating himself.

For a moment, Eddie stares at him in silence. Then he sits down on Richie’s bed, still hugging the cast against his chest, the way he used to when they were kids. "I told Myra to stay in New York, not to bother flying out. I think I’m getting a divorce.” He stares at his left hand, its band of pale skin still visible.

“Right. I’m sorry,” Richie says, and he is, because Eddie might be a duplicitous asshole, and Myra might be an Oedipal nightmare, but Eddie is staring at the naked skin of his left hand like he might cry. Richie wonders if it’s the first time he’s ever taken it off, the token of his normalcy, the proof that there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with Eddie Kaspbrak, no siree.

“I’m not,” Eddie says, like every word hurts him. “I’m not fucking sorry. After all this bullshit…” Eddie shakes his head, thumbing the side of his mouth. “You just fucking left, Richie."

Richie is on unfamiliar ground. He thinks he wants to be sick. “People tell me their favourite view is my ass as I walk out of rooms."

“Shut up. Don’t make me regret breaking out of hospital.”

Richie shrugs, helplessly, his hands spread wide enough to encompass how adrift he feels. He’s been here before, in this room, with Eddie this close, and it wasn’t fucking real. If he closes his eyes and says it loud enough, Eddie might disappear altogether, and he doesn’t think he could take it all over again. “I don’t know why you’re here, Eds."

“That makes two of us,” Eddie snaps. He rolls his eyes hard. “Can you stop fucking looming and just come over here? Please.”

Richie does as instructed, stumbling towards him like he’s walking back into that goddamn sewer. Eddie makes space beside him, lets him perch there, feeling exposed in his shorts and the t-shirt that doesn’t adequately cover his incipient boner. This can’t possibly be what it seems like, because this is real, this isn’t the Deadlights and their fantasy newsreel of Richie’s past, present and future. Eddie might be the bravest of all of them, but there’s no fucking way -

With careful deliberation, Eddie puts a hand on Richie’s thigh. It feels like all the air has been punched out of Richie’s chest at once, and he swears Eddie smiles, but it looks a lot like a grimace. He never wants to see Eddie in pain again for as long as he lives.

“I remember,” Eddie says, quietly. “I remember every single fucking thing. That fucking hammock. You used to put your hands all over me, and I liked it so much it made me want to crawl out of my fucking skin.”

“You were always in those tiny shorts,” Richie says, because if he doesn’t say something his heart’s going to leap right out of his mouth. “I’m only human."

“I’ve been so fucking scared of the way you make me feel.”

“Gee, Spaghetti man, you sure know how to charm a girl.”

“Look, dickwad,” Eddie hisses, his voice catching, “can you cut me a fucking break?"

Richie relents, because Eddie looks like he’s holding himself together with spit and determination, and it looks to be fraying with every moment he sits there with his hand on Richie’s bare thigh. “You think it was any different for me?”

He thinks about the things he'd whispered to that other Eddie in the false sanctuary of the Deadlights. “You left a scar right through the middle of me. I’ve never - I’ve tried, but no one ever came close - I didn’t even know what they couldn’t compare to - “

Eddie kisses him, one hand carefully on either side of his face, the plaster cast rough and heavy against his cheek. 30 years of bogus memories are dancing in front of Richie’s eyes, enough to drive him crazy, and the only person - the only thing in the world - that doesn’t make him want to scream right now is sitting in front of him, looking like he might die of embarrassment, even as he presses his closed lips against the corner of Richie’s mouth.

Eddie’s hands are shaking. His back is taut like there’s a tension wire running straight out the top of his head. He’s kissing Richie like they’re fifteen again. Richie thinks he might cry, so he wraps one large hand round the back of Eddie’s neck to steady him and licks into his mouth with a steady patience he doesn’t usually possess. Eddie makes a noise like he’s been shot and sags against him, fingers spasming and twisting in the front of Richie’s t-shirt. 

“Richie -” he gasps, sounding desperate and shocked. Richie’s heard his name said with that kind of helplessness before, has to close his eyes to ward off the not-quite-memory.

“I know,” he says, cradling Eddie’s face in his hands. “Me too, Eds.”

It’s clearly what Eddie wants to hear, because the next thing Richie knows, Eddie is up in his space in a much more insistent manner than before, uninjured hand slipping under the worn t-shirt and into the waistband of his shorts, desperate little tugs at his clothes like Eddie’s frustration alone will be enough to make them disappear. Richie laughs, because this, angry and impatient, a firecracker in short-shorts, is exactly what he’s always wanted, even when he couldn’t remember why.

Eddie is swearing at him, hissing in his ear: “Get naked, asshole, I swear to god -”

Removing clothes necessitates a degree of separation of which Richie seriously disapproves. He strips off his t-shirt in one rapid movement and reaches for Eddie immediately, working fingers under his clothes. This need to see and to touch is so far removed from his meagre experience of sex, so different from the times he’s plucked up the courage take someone to bed. He wonders briefly if Eddie’s ever done anything similar, if he’s had anyone else’s hands on him, except Myra, in the whole time since Richie left town in 1992.

“If this is too fast,” he says, unable to finish the thought because he doesn’t think he’s capable of slowing down. He wants hands on Eddie all the time, on every part he can reach, delighted and terrified in turns by the unfamiliar, pale, wiry body he’s uncovering. Eddie’s belly is soft like his, the hair there brown and soft and much more sparse than Richie’s used to. He wants to sink his hands into Eddie, climb inside him.

Eddie seems to have similar intentions, if the hand clawing its way down his back is any indication. Eddie kisses him again, pushes his tongue against Richie’s in a way that is completely obscene, slings a knee over Richie’s waist, and hauls himself into his lap. He wraps an arm around Richie’s shoulders, just in case Richie had any idea of putting distance between them. He’s still in his jeans and the cast is held awkwardly between them, but Richie’s dick has been straining at his shorts since Eddie made him sit beside him on the bed and he can’t help bucking up against taut denim as Eddie squirms his way closer.

“Fuck, Richie -” Eddie gasps, rigid and dumbstruck, right in his ear.

Richie, delighted, licks a stripe along Eddie’s collarbone, just because he can. “That’s the general idea, yeah. Allow me to lend a hand?”

Eddie’s too far gone to complain about Richie’s disgusting mouth, the way he always used to when Richie found excuses to nuzzle at him. Instead, he surges against him, saying, “Never thought you’d be a gentleman about it, Trashmouth. Put your fucking hands on me."

“You’ve thought about it?” Richie murmurs, while his mind short-circuits and he fumbles for the zipper of Eddie’s jeans.

Eddie moans, pushing up against his hand. “Oh fuck, I remember - _fuck_, Richie, I remember, I remember -”

Eddie’s hands, previously engaged in tugging Richie’s hair out by the roots, are suddenly balled tight on his shoulders. Eddie is panting hard, his eyes screwed shut. “Oh my god, Richie – _stop_."

“Eddie?” Richie lifts his hands as though Eddie’s skin has burned him. “Is your arm - "

“I remember,” Eddie says, sounding distraught. “I couldn’t think about it, couldn’t think about you, even when we’d been sitting in that goddamn hammock all day long.”

Richie recalls again the excuses he had made for touching Eddie, the little lies he’d spun to himself to explain the fact that his hand was on Eddie’s skin again. “I was always trying to find reasons for touching you. Made out it was to stop you squirming around and tipping us out. You let me.”

“Of course I fucking let you, I wanted you to touch me. But I couldn’t - when I got home - I couldn’t think about it. I tried to, once, but that fucking thing was in my head - ” He shuddered. “The leper. I couldn’t -”

Richie draws a careful circle on the soft skin of Eddie’s waist. He waits a long count of five, hoping Eddie finds his inept ministrations comforting. “All I’m hearing is that thinking about me made you want to beat off. Which, you know, as well as being immensely flattering, is hot as all hell.” He mimes fanning himself, watching Eddie’s mouth turn upwards, the smile creeping onto his face the way it always had, despite himself. “You been thinking about me touching you a lot?”

“All the goddamn time,” Eddie groans, sagging forward so his forehead rests on Richie’s bony shoulder. It can’t be said to be comfortable, but neither of them moves. “I’m such a fucking screw-up,” he says, in a small, angry voice.

“Hey,” Richie says, his fingers still drawing patterns on Eddie’s skin, marvelling at the novelty of being allowed. “Don’t sell yourself short, you’re a closeted screw-up with severe amnesia. I think you’re a catch.”

“Fuck you, Richie,” Eddie replies. Richie knows he’s frowning the way he always used to when he tried to pretend he didn’t want to smile. “You’re not exactly Mr Universe, you know.”

“’S why you love me,” Richie sing-songs, then immediately wishes he could stuff his tongue down his own throat. He hadn’t intended to raise the spectre of his feelings this early in the game - or indeed at all, if necessary - and had somehow turned Eddie’s recollection of being unwillingly attracted to him and disgusted by himself because of it, into a declaration. Nice going, Tozier. He can almost hear the clown under the panicked way his heart is racing: _not the other boys, Richie, they’ll know._

Eddie lifts his head, frowning, and Richie realises his hands are still on Eddie’s hips. He lets go immediately, drawing them back to the safety of the blanket either side of Eddie’s wide-open knees. 

“Richie?”

“Forget about it,” Richie says quickly, bracing himself for Eddie clambering off him and realising his mistake in attempting this with someone so fucking thirsty for affection that he can’t help but chase after it, even when there’s not even the slightest prospect of rain. Nice fucking going.

“Are you kidding me?” Eddie demands, however, flicking Richie directly on the left nipple with the fingers of his uninjured hand. “No, really, are you kidding me, right now? You think I broke out of the hospital and climbed straight on your dick because I don’t _love you_? You really are shit for brains.”

“Words to echo through the ages,” Richie murmurs, incredulous, rubbing at his chest. Eddie has that look of manic belligerence in his eyes, like he’s about to start a fight with the entire world because it had looked at Richie funny. _Oh_. He remembers that look, too, not that he’d recognised it at the time. “Are you serious?”

Eddie tries to fold his arms, but has to settle for propping one hand against his hip, creating a ridiculous, angry tableau, straddling Richie’s flagging boner with his own dick halfway out of his jeans. “You heard me.”

Richie ruins the mood by immediately having an anxiety attack. One minute he’s clamped between Eddie’s knees, the next he’s doubled over on the lumpen mattress, gasping for breath as Eddie soothes circles on his back and panics loudly and obscenely in his ear. 

“Fuck - Richie - breathe with me, asshole - come on, 1-2-3-4 - that’s it, you’re doing fine -“

Minutes later - it feels like hours, but then it always does, and usually he has Xanax and hard liquor to suppress the panic until a more convenient moment, like not when he’s about to stride onstage and deliver a monologue about his laughably non-existent girlfriend. Minutes later, he’s lying on his back on the mattress with Eddie peering down at him worriedly. His dick’s still hanging out of his jeans, and suddenly Richie finds himself laughing so hard he thinks he might actually be sick, after all.

“The fuck, Richie?” Eddie demands, thumping him on the arm, “I thought you were fucking dying, you asshole. It’s not cool to laugh at a man with his dick on display. How about I crack up the next time you want me to jerk you off, see how you like it.”

Eddie’s angry, concerned face, and the words _next time_ are enough to set Richie off again, only this time it’s relief, because it turns out they’re both closeted screw-ups, and for the first time in his life Richie has a reason to be happy about it.

Eddie finishes peeling off his jeans and tucks himself back into his shorts before he flops down beside him. He grumbles about the state of the sheets, muttering imprecations about hotel laundry and his reservations about the likelihood of there being industry-standard cleaning facilities in this fucked up, backward town. Richie listens to him for a while, one hand resting on his stomach and the other grazing Eddie’s ribs with the backs of his fingers, measuring the rapid rise and fall of his breath.

“Come to LA,” he murmurs into Eddie’s hair when they’ve been lying there in silence for a minute or two. “You’ll hate it. It’s full of phoneys, and it’s too fucking hot, but I really want you to come back there with me.”

“Rich, I have a job.”

“You got stabbed in the face, pretty sure you can give yourself the time off. My apartment’s leased til the end of September, but after that...”

“Richie, what are we doing?” Eddie whispers, his voice so full of confusion and fear and everything Richie has spent the past 27 years of his life living. “What the fuck are we doing?”

“Whatever we want,” Richie says, his voice rough enough that Eddie glances up at him. He wraps his hand around Eddie’s shoulder, pulls him in, lets himself have this thing, even though he can’t quite let himself believe he has it. “From now on, we’re doing whatever the fuck we want."


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here we are. It took a while, but some shit's finally been fixed - thanks for sticking with me and this story this far. Turns out our favourite idiots have issues for days, so there's already a sequel in the works. Thanks again for comments, etc. - means the world <3
> 
> -

They leave Derry two days later. The Town House stands empty and will no doubt continue in its elegant decline, until it, like the House on Neibolt, fades into the history of a town that no longer cares to remember it. As they depart, Richie takes one final look and realises the house no longer seems sinister, only sad, something about its ageing facade softened by the knowledge of the terrors they encountered there and survived. Victory casts Derry in a generous light; with It gone, even the railway bridge, with its poorly-spelled graffiti and the Kenduskeag swirling grey and sullen below it, appears picturesque.

“Where are we going?” Eddie demands, when Richie takes a right on Jackson. Behind them, Mike’s car continues on down Main Street. 

“Got something to show you."

“I swear to God, if this is a set up for a dick joke, I will end you,” Eddie says, rolling his eyes. “It’s not like you need an elaborate cover story anymore, if you want me to suck it.”

Richie wills his heart to stop racing. There’s no reason for him to be nervous. Apparently, as a result of what’s passed between them in the last two days, Eddie has granted him tacit permission to request extempore blowjobs, and is at ease enough to joke about it. Excuse Richie if he needs a moment. In return, Richie is about to offer Eddie evidence of the depth and persistence of his affections, and although he’s double-super-safety-sure that Eddie will accept it for what it is, there’s lingering fear, too. Of taking something he’s kept so safe, for so long - _your dir-ty little secret_ \- and exposing it. He snorts, because Eddie was right about the dick joke.

“You always did say the sweetest things, Eds. Alright, we’re here.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? This shitty town could be eating dust in our rear-view mirror, and you want me to take a romantic walk with you along the banks of the murder canal?”

“Not the canal, dipshit. Just - shut up, alright? Get out of the fucking car.”

It takes Richie a moment to find it; he’s got the not-quite-memory of the Deadlights to guide him, but with Eddie standing beside him he worries it will turn out that this, too, was a fabrication. That it’ll be gone; sanded down and painted over by a poorly-paid municipal worker at some point in the intervening years.

“Here it is,” he says, crouching to see it clearly. It’s just below eye level, worn and faded but indisputably there. He touches one hand to the letters, follows the shapes of them with his fingers. 

Eddie, behind him, is uncharacteristically silent. Richie glances at him over his shoulder, bracing himself for the rejection he knows he won’t encounter, but can’t help but fear. Eddie is staring at their initials carved into the soft, old wood of the Kissing Bridge. 

“Eddie?” Richie hears himself say, disgusted by how tentative he sounds.

“You did this back then?” Eddie asks.

“Remember the day before I left? We hung out in the Clubhouse.” Richie shrugs. “Came here after. I wanted to have said it, somewhere, just the once.”

Eddie is still staring at the letters and Richie can’t bear to look at him anymore, so he reaches into the inner pocket of his jacket and fishes out the penknife. He’d borrowed it from Mike that morning, promising to return it by post, but Mike had said, “Keep it,” with a smile and tucked it into the top pocket of his shirt. 

Richie starts to scrape away at the wood again, just like he had last time, in the memory that wasn’t. His fear starts to dissipate as he carves. Just like the first time, the act itself is enough to make him feel free, or at least a little less afraid.

With a start, Richie realises Eddie has sunk down to a crouch beside him and is holding out an open hand. 

“Gimme that,” Eddie says, taking hold of the knife. Richie lets him. He watches, awed, as Eddie carefully, with great concentration, carves an ‘E’ over the one Richie placed there years before. Eddie contemplates their handiwork, sitting back on his heels and tracing a finger over the letters, as though making sure they’re carved deep enough to last.

Eddie gets to his feet, handing Richie the knife when he follows suit. Richie’s aware he’s probably gaping like an idiot, but he’s beginning to realise that’s a new power Eddie possesses, since the whole dick-sucking revelation: the ability to render Richie speechless at any given moment of any given day.

The setting sun reminds him of the Deadlights. He wonders how long it will be until he stops thinking about them so frequently; he hasn’t asked Bev, because he’s mostly certain he won’t like the answer.

“You kissed me here, once,” he says, absently.

Eddie’s entire face screws up in confusion. “Fairly fucking sure I didn’t.”

Richie laughs. “No,” he agrees, “you’re right. Do it now, then.”

“Here?"

“Right here.”

Eddie’s eyes are suddenly shining, bright as always at the prospect of a challenge. “Alright then, you asshole,” he says and tugs Richie towards him with fingers clenched on the drawstrings of his hoodie. 

With one hand in Richie’s hair, the other on his ass, Eddie kisses him, hard. 

Richie’s reeling when they break apart. He’s tensed in anticipation of a cry of _fucking fags_ from an unseen observer and is frankly astonished when it doesn’t come, because this is Derry, and Richie Tozier doesn’t get to stand in the street in brought daylight kissing Eddie Kaspbrak without paying his dues.

Eddie’s eyes are wide and terrified, but his mouth is curling upwards in a triumphant smile. “There’s your fucking kiss. Happy now?”

Richie can only nod dumbly, some cowardly part of him waiting for the big reveal, for Eddie’s face to dissolve into caustic primordial ooze, for consciousness to overcome him and drag him kicking and screaming out of whatever dream this turns out to be. Eddie’s still got a fist clenched in the front of his hoodie. It feels real. 

Eddie’s frowning at him like he’s a complete and total idiot.

“Can we get the fuck out of here, now?” He demands. 

Richie is only too happy to oblige.


End file.
